Reading this morning’s special “green” issue of the New York Times Magazine, it occurred to me to wonder what would be involved in engineering a full month of green frugality into my ordinary routine.

Obviously, I can’t afford $30,000 or $40,000 to electrify my house with solar panels. And my life is already fairly frugal and green relative to the way most Americans apparently live. But I could do better.

What would a month of extreme frugality at my house look like?

Gasoline and Transport

1. • Commute by bus
   

2. • Walk or bicycle to Albertson’s, Walgreen’s, Sprouts for incidental grocery purchases
   

3. • Plan grocery and Home Depot trips to minimize the number of trips
   

4. • Buy hardware items at Ace, near a grocery store; combine shops
   

5. • Go to grocery stores, Ace, and Costco only on the way home from work
   

6. • Drive slower on freeways
   

7. • Never make a special trip to buy one thing
   

Utilities

1. • Water all plants by hand
   

2. • Wash dishes by hand or on dishwasher’s short cycle
   

3. • Wash clothes in cold water only, on shortest cycle
   

4. • Wash colored and white clothes in same load
   

5. • Line-dry all clothing
   

6. • Reduce the number of hours the pool pump runs
   

7. • Keep AC off until outside temperature reaches 100 degrees
   

8. • Set thermostat at 80 degrees during day, 78 degrees at night
   

9. • Hang exterior curtains (old sheets) over single-paned windows in back
   

10. • Avoid turning on lights: use candles instead of lights
    

11. • Shower instead of bathing
    

12. • When weather reaches 95 degrees, shower in backyard hose
    

13. • Use a battery-operated camp lantern to read in bed, or don’t read in bed
    

14. • Turn off the computer (the only electricity hog except digital clocks on the oven and microwave) at the surge protector
    

15. • Switch to time-of-day billing
    

Food

1. • Never go into a grocery store or Costco without a list
   

2. • Never buy anything that is not on the list
   

3. • Read grocery flyers; shop sales and use coupons
   

4. • Plan each week’s breakfast, lunch, & dinner menus
   

5. • Have at least two vegetarian days a week, involving polenta, pasta, beans, or grains
   

6. • Cook at least two meals a week that create leftovers
   

7. • Eat the leftovers, do not let them spoil
   

8. • Buy produce at Food City
   

9. • Use limes from tree instead of lemons
   

10. • Drink only water; do not drink coffee or tea
    

11. • Grow produce
    

House maintenance

1. • Lay off the yard guy
   

2. • Water by hand
   

3. • Broom and dust-mop floors instead of vacuuming
   

Some of these ideas aren’t very practical. Specifically:

1. • A round-trip bus commute to the Great Desert University from my house takes a total of 4½ hours; in a car, the round trip takes one hour. I’m just not willing to use that many of my waking hours getting back and forth to work. However, I can telecommute once a week, which saves some gas. Also, I get 8.12 hours of vacation time per pay period, and so for a month I could, in theory, use it to take an extra no-drive day every two weeks. However, that would mean I would stop accruing vacation time, an idea that does not appeal.
   

1. • An Albertson’s (which is about to close), a Sprouts, and a Walgreen’s occupy the intersection of two huge thoroughfares about a half-mile to the south. However with a broken toe I most certainly can’t walk a mile for groceries and incidentals. Bicycling is extremely dangerous, because there’s no way to move along the main drags without risk of being hit. Also, the area itself isn’t safe; I don’t shop in those stores unless forced to, because of harassment by panhandlers and the presence of obvious gang members.
   

1. • As long as I’m laid up with a broken foot, I can’t very well tromp around doing yard work, either. So at least for the next month or two, the yard dude has a job.
   

1. • Although the power companies would like us to run our pools at night, the pool companies tell us that’s a fair way to fill up your pool with algae. The reason you run a pump is to circulate disinfectants to prevent algal growth; algae grow in sunlight, and so if the water is still during the day, you will have algae, no matter how much chlorine you dump in the water. Besides, since I don’t have time-of-day billing, it wouldn’t make any difference.
   

1. • There’s not a chance I’m going to wash my dishes by hand—hassle factor aside, they just don’t get clean enough. But my Bosch does do a decent job on the short cycle.
   

1. • Salt River Project, my utility company, does offer time-of-day billing. However, by sunset I’m dead exhausted and not bloody likely to feel like doing laundry. Besides, I never have more than two loads a week; if I washed the coloreds and whites together, it would be one load. The big energy guzzler at my house is the air conditioner, and really, there’s nothing I can do about that. Even with the thermostat set at 80 or 82 degrees, when the outside temperatures range from 105 to 110 degrees and up, it’s going to run during the daytime and it’s going to run a lot. I can’t jack up the thermostat any higher without harming the sick old dog, screwing up the refrigerator’s operation, and risking damage to the furniture. Besides, I’m not interested in making myself miserable for the sake of saving twenty bucks.
   

Still, that leaves a lot of ways to frugalize. Without shifting the commute to public transportation, walking or bicycling to nearby grocery stores, and turning up the thermostat into the unlivable range, it can’t be called anything like extreme frugality, though probably navigating the house by candlelight and showering in the garden hose fall into that category.

1. • Making grocery-store, hardware, and Costco runs only on the way home from work would save gas: it would mean I would never go out of my way to make routine purchases. Although there’s no Home Depot on any of my routes to GDU, a large Ace shares the same strip mall with a Basha’s that is on the way. Since the nearest Home Depot is about seven miles from my house, just buying at the Ace would save gas.  Besides, HD is a money pit: shopping at an Ace probably would reduce the impulse buys.
   

1. • The tap water in this area is barely potable. If you use a pool chemical test kit on it, you find it has the same amount of chlorine and other chemicals as pool water. During the summer the city adds even more gunk to it. In July and August, even the dog won’t drink tap water—I have to run it through a Brita filter to get her to swallow it. Delicious! However, it probably wouldn’t poison me to drop a lime or orange slice into the stuff to disguise the flavor, saving on expensive coffee beans and tea leaves.
   

1. • Driving slower on the freeways is dangerous. The speed limits here are 55 and 65 miles per hour, but no matter what speed zone you’re in, if you’re going under 70 mph you’re a road hazard. The freeways are virtually unpatrolled, and so except in Scottsdale, where they have speed cameras, drivers do as they please. Drive at or under the limit and people tailgate you, jerk around you, cut in front of you, and flick you off furiously—plus highway shootings are now pretty routine. It’s probably not a good idea to deliberately infuriate fellow motorists. However, I could make it a habit to watch for slow-moving vehicles and ride behind them, making it appear that I’m not the one who’s holding up the parade.
   

Otherwise, except for hanging ugly sheets on the outside of the single-paned windows (which wouldn’t be visible from the street but which might spoil my own enjoyment of the yard), nothing about any of the other ideas would impinge significantly on my lifestyle. Some of them, I’m already doing: friends find the climate inside my house during the summertime uncomfortable, for example, and even though I use the lights in the evening, they are CFLs, whose unpleasant ambience people have remarked upon but which supposedly save money.

I’m going to try all of these other than riding the bus to work, walking or bicycling to the questionable nearby stores, switching to time-of-day electricity billing, and washing dishes by hand.

The American Express billing cycle closes today. Let’s see what happens over the next month (April 21 to May 20) to the following budget categories, which are charged on AMEX, compared with the costs from March 21 to April 20:

The city water department and Salt River Project bill by the month. So, let’s compare the May 2007 bill with the May 2008 bill, bearing in mind that both water and electricity are rising by about 9% this year:

We’ll check back on these figures next month. Tune in May 20, same time, same place!

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categories: frugality